The Team

Meg Shout

Digital Executive

Google recently launched a savvy new tool within Adwords that is sure to help with analysing and optimising from a keyword level. The new tool is called Auction Insights, and can be found at keyword level under the ‘Keywords detail’ drop down. The purpose of the Auction Insights tool is to allow Adwords advertisers to compare performance and stats against other advertisers who are participating in the same auction as you. You are able to compare impressions share, position and other metrics such as Overlap Rate, Position Above Rate and Top of Page Rate, which will be explained below.

Overlap Rate: This metric gives details about how often you and other advertisers received impressions at the same time for a keyword.

Position Above Rate: This metric gives details about how often a competitor’s ad was shown in a position that was higher than your own for the same auction.

Top of Page Rate: This metric gives details about how often your ad, and sometimes your competitor’s ads, were shown at the top of an auction, above natural search results.

The Auction Insight tool only provides information on competitors that participated in the same auction as you, but does not mean that the competitor has the same keyword, match type or targeting options as you. The tool does not give details about the settings and strategies of a competitor’s account or their SEM strategies, but rather stats that allow you to target and optimise your keywords better against your competitors. Please note that, sometimes running this report for a keyword will yield no results, and that is due to that specific keyword not meeting the minimum threshold of activity in order to give report data.